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by wjn0 2154 days ago
> * Public access to research results, methods, and data, with some exceptions (such as PII)

You mentioned PII, so I'm assuming some familiarity with the health field. I'm curious about your thoughts on the position that one should not be required to immediately publicize their data, because there needs to be an expectation that a researcher can translate the capital (both time and money) they expend to acquire quality data into academic and institutional capital (in the form of research output, i.e. papers). The fear being, there might be insufficient motivation to conduct large data collection-oriented studies due to another researcher beating the data collector to the punch in terms of publishing certain findings.
2 comments
woofie11 2154 days ago
My opinion is that it'd be better to handle that from the other side: incentive structures. If I generate a useful data set, I should get the equivalent of citations/publication/career credits for any work from that dataset. Enabling science is just as important as new results.

But I don't care much, so long as it gets published within a sensible timeframe.

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dodobirdlord 2153 days ago
At the very least it seems like it would be fraud not to include the original collector of the data as a co-author on the analysis paper.
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woofie11 2153 days ago
I know at least one professor where one person generated the data. Another person cleaned the data. The professor got her faculty position by taking the cleaned data, running a regression on it, and publishing the first result. The original research team could have done the work in 15 minutes, but wanted to hold off on publication.

It got a ton of citations and press for her.

The research was at MIT. I won't mention where she's a professor, out of interests of privacy. I know several similar cases at MIT too.

But if it was fraud, what would one do about it? Screaming about this sort of thing kills everyone's careers, and embarrasses the institution the research was done at. It's no good for anyone involved. People move on. The whole system incentivizes this sort of fraud, and faculty positions are hypercompetitive, so people follow those incentive structures to be successful.

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